Google used to be hailed for its tinker-time projects, the 20% that people used to get away from regular work to do interesting projects. What we are seeing emerge now is Google as a model for structured innovation.

Earlier I wrote about the 3 keys to innovation in the 21st century. In short, I said companies have to move beyond the idea of incremental vs disruptive innovation. There are now three types of innovation and they are not incremental or disruptive - Google serves as an example of these in action.

They are: the return of very long term innovation, innovate every day, and enterprise transformation.

Actually in its core business it has been caught out by innovate every day. In social search and in communities Google was aced by Microsoft and by Facebook. But now it has caught up, and caught up also in the UI where it had an Apple moment around design last year. And across its complex portfolio Google has also adopted a leaner release cycle particularly for its Cloud based products.

UPDATE - Here is an inventory from the reader comments:

We are constantly innovating, figuring out new more efficient ways to remove heat from machines while reducing pollution. We publish our findings, after they have been vetted. After a few years, our designs start showing up in other companies’ datacenters. We only waste 7-8% of our power on overhead. The norm *used* to be 50-100%.

YouTube was converted to use Google technology. It would not be what it is without Google’s expertise in networking and distributed computing. Android was barely more than an idea when Google merged with it. Google is what made it what it is.

Google+ is the infrastructure that ties all of the Google services together.

Google continually pioneers, and publishes for all to use, innovative new Internet technologies. SPDY, Real-time resource sharing, Go, Dart, Closure. And they work with standards committees to advance the state of the Internet so that *every* browser becomes more powerful, and not locked into proprietary formats.

Google also innovates in the area of large-scale distributed computing. We publish papers on this and our ideas become the basis for computing at our competitors’ datacenters and in open source projects that are available to everyone.

Very long term research is making a come back and Google is doing its bit to promote it with is driverless car and Glass projects. Though there's been a fuss about the driverless car being sooner than you think, actually Google's project has a much longer time horizon than that of the car makers. Google is doing the long term thinking on structural innovation. Similarly with Glass, no phone maker has been as public or visionary.

#Google - Enterprise transformation

Finally companies need to change themselves. Google is letting itself down here. It's still far to secretive for us to know how the structure is shaping up and there are no pronouncements from Page on how he might innovate enterprise wealth creation. In fact the company tends to shrink back into the same shell - ad dollars - when stressed.

Still, like Amazon, they are relatively free of Wall St so why not show us what the enterprise of 2030 might look like